Why do ad industry gurus recycle the same old pap? This morning I clicked on an article by an alleged marketing guru on how to be more effective on Facebook. I’m always interested in enhancing my skills. Silly me. After reading the article, I couldn’t help thinking that a spot-on headline would have been: “Skip these five so-called ‘pointers’ unless you are new to the arcane process of thinking.”To be fair, the article in question is but one in a parade of banal embarrassments-in-writing purporting to advise the advertising industry which in fact any moron without so much as an iota of professional experience could have come up with (and probably already has) on his or her own. Where is the stuff to broaden my horizons, add to my skill set, challenge my thinking? Don’t give me the line about needing to hear and re-hear the basics until we master them or about how fundamentals bear repeating. I am not talking about basics or fundamentals, but mindless platitudes presented as insights and foisted on working professionals.

I suspect two reasons as to why alleged gurus recycle such pap ad nauseam ...

Reason 1: It’s not usual for people to prefer validation to broadened horizons and challenged thinking. We’d rather someone tell us we’re on the right track than have someone suggest how we might do things better. After all, the latter implies that we’d have to do things differently, and who wants to concede needing to change? (Not that marketers have exclusive rights to the don’t-tell-me-I-have-to-change frame of mind. It is human nature.)

Reason 2: When I visit with alleged marketing gurus, I am oft surprised at how little substance any of them really have to offer in the first place. Why should they? The market doesn’t demand it. We The Market elevate them to guru status precisely because they make us comfortable. (See Reason 1.) In business as in religion, if you want your market to follow you, don’t tell them they must change. Tell them they’re doing just fine, not to change a thing, and that those who doubt them just don’t get it. —Steve Cuno

Come on. The mail isn’t that slow.

The postcard pictured at right arrived in today’s mail. Flipping it over, I found two photos, each with a brief bio. According to the bios, one “newest associate” joined the firm in 2006. The other joined in 2005. Either this card spent years lost in the mail or someone is a little slow getting out the news. (In an uncommon fit of mercy or restraint or discretion or whatever, I masked the architectural firm’s name and logo.)

Being First:Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

When you cannot make reliable predictions from a rule, there is no reason to believe you have a rule at all

This morning we at the RESPONSE Agency were speculating as to why Kindle so handily outsells Nook and iBooks. At first we were inclined to explain it with, “Kindle was here first.” After all, being first gives you a strategic advantage, right? Even Ries and Trout said so in 1981 in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Except, being first can also give you a strategic disadvantage. It provides an opportunity for a competitor, espying your weaknesses, to outdo you. For every Kindle that remained impervious to a Nook newcomer, there’s a Prodigy or an AOL whose decaying corpse fertilized the ground for a Google. For every Coke that would consign Pepsi to playing catch-up, there’s a Walmart that overtook Sears, a WordPerfect that trounced WordStar, a Microsoft Word that then trounced WordPerfect, a Toyota that’s beating GM, a Redbox that mortally wounded Blockbuster, and so forth.

Or consider Kodak, who recently filed for bankruptcy. Their demise was largely due to competition from digital photography. Which, by the way, Kodak invented.

If you happen to be the first to bring a product to market, will it work for or against you?

You will have to await outcomes before you can answer.

Given that, good luck coming up with a reliable rule as to the advantages or disadvantages of being first. When you cannot make reliable predictions from a rule, there is no reason to believe you have a rule at all.

—Steve Cuno

First-ness Folly

When Ries and Trout wrote Positioning, not a few naive marketers took at its word the chapter about the importance of being first and rushed out ads claiming first-ness.

A Salt Lake City mall went through embarrassing historical gyrations to claim they were “America’s first mall.” For one thing and of lesser importance, the claim was flimsy. For another and of greater import, no one cared.

Indeed, the mall missed the point. Being first in the customer mind is not the same thing as tapping a customer on the shoulder while he or she is in line to buy a popular widget and saying, “Er, technically, we made one of those before they did.” Land Rover enthusiasts don’t care that Jeep was here first.

Imagine if a company called Caffeine-Cocaine surfaced with a legitimate claim to having mixed a batch of cola syrup before Doc Pemberton did. Do not think for one minute that consumers would abandon their beloved Coke on such a technicality.—SC

Over the weekend I happend upon a spot-on critique of an insulting, to men and women alike, Twix campaign. The post inspired me to blog about the campaign myself. But then, I thought, why? There is no improving upon what “DebGod” wrote. Click here to read her post on Skepchick.com. While you’re at it, set aside a few minutes to browse the rest of the site. Well worth it.

Like any, mine is a sucker for flattery that is properly conceived and delivered.

Email and direct mail are great flattery delivery vehicles. A good writer can create the illusion of a personal communication even if in fact you have sent out millions.

But notice the “properly conceived” caveat. Don’t tell me I’m a person of integrity, that you know I won’t settle for second-best, that I have a certain je ne sais quoi, or that God made me just a little lower than the angels but quite a bit higher than other mortals. Such are gooey, banal generalities. Readers pass right over them.

The trick to making flattery fly is to use your targeting skills. Smart targeting is more than making a list of likely buyers. It’s knowing something about them, so you can infer something about what matters to them and talk with them about it—intelligently and credibly.

In other words, don’t try to manipulate with hollow words. Do your homework so that you can meet your reader eye-to-eye, and offer a compliment that is real.

I have two examples for you.

Example 1, an email from Target Marketing asking me to participate in a survey, showed up this morning. I rarely bother with online surveys. Most are poorly constructed bias-wise (as was this one), but it hooked me. How? The opening line of the survey said, “Pssst! We know you know your stuff. That’s why we’d like to pick your brain!”

Lest you dismiss those as hollow words, let me explain something about us direct marketers. We like to think we know stuff that our cousins in branding agencies don’t. We think we spend our clients’ money more responsibly. Yet branding is easier to sell to a client, it’s more fun to do, it wins awards you can polish and display in your office, your neighbors see your work and compliment you on it, and it makes your ad agency way more money. Thus not only do we think we know our stuff, we fancy ourselves martyrs of a sort. It may be baseless and delusional, but it’s how we see ourselves.

“We know you know your stuff” does more than hit the proverbial nail’s head. It massages backs sore from cross-bearing.